Space-Doppler adaptive processing for radar imaging of moving targets masked by ground clutter

Non-cooperative moving targets appear defocused within synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and, in the case of ground targets, the blurring effect because of the uncompensated target motion decreases the radar´s detection capabilities. Ground clutter, if sufficiently strong, may also obscure individual scatterers on moving targets resulting in a decreased ability to successfully classify the target. In this study, clutter suppression and inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging are combined to obtain high-resolution images of non-cooperative moving ground targets within SAR images. The clutter suppression technique proposed here is ISAR application oriented and is termed space-Doppler adaptive processing. Results obtained by processing a real dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.